The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather

Church of the Arts

Robert Fulford in the National Post discusses why art is his religion. The cons and the pros.

. . . we also can’t claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. I knew a man who had Shakespeare, Verdi, Beethoven and the rest of the gang played at him by the greatest performers of his time, night after night for a lifetime. Did no good. He remained gloomy, narrow and hopelessly addicted to conventional wisdom. He was like the oaf in Love’s Labour’s Lost who has “never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book, so his intellect is not replenished . . . .”